


seven-second delay

by acroamatica



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, College AU, Depression, Dysphoria, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, M/M, More tags to be added, Trans Hux, bad trip, drug use (lsd and marijuana), drug-induced panic attacks, lateline dj au, modern au - 1960s-1970s, shakespeare as a tool to pick up girls
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 15:33:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7538254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acroamatica/pseuds/acroamatica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about two people finding out who they are, and who might want them anyway.</p><p>Disc One, Side One: Eileen, Masters student in Political Science, meets Ben, freshman military historian; Shakespeare plays matchmaker; and a journey of discovery winds up revealing rather more than anyone had anticipated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	seven-second delay

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was a special request from sailershanty, and this chapter is two days too late to be a birthday present but is one anyway. love you, my dude. <3
> 
> please read the tags. this fic features a trans character (still pre-transition) and if you don't like trans headcanons now would be an excellent time to [find something else to read](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Hux*s*Kylo%20Ren/works?page=1).
> 
> many thanks to zombiebrainsoup, starsshinedarkly77, xavieri, and as always, coldhope and byzantienne, for letting me yell, and for yelling back.

(1965 - that unfortunate he)

The sun was in Eileen’s eyes when she stepped out of the building. She squinted against it and thought for the twentieth, thirtieth, two-hundredth time that she should buy a pair of sunglasses. Every morning she wondered, was this the day she got used to California, the day she stopped noticing how much it was a foreign country? 

But foreign it remained, and never more so than with the sun in her eyes, burning down on the skin she still had to keep shaded as much as possible lest she redden, and peel, and more freckles bloom in the wake of it. She was different enough from the born-and-raised Californians as it was, and knew it. Couldn’t fail to, really. If her accent weren’t enough - the blue pallor and the blaze of her hair, even plaited and restrained as it usually was - then it would still have jumped at her how much she wasn’t American, couldn’t pretend to have inherited the Californian culture of openness. She was English, and sharp-edged, and closed off, polite and perfect to within an inch of tolerances, and she clutched her books to her chest and let the edges of the covers dig into her ribs.

The rhetoric class had been useful, today. Professor Wilcox had let them practise on each other, then called up a few of them to try their talents on the whole room. She hadn’t thought he would call on her, but nonetheless she’d been ready enough when he had, and had made her argument with just enough flavour that she could feel the energy of the room tune in.

“Very _good_ , Miss Hux,” Wilcox had said, as she’d tapped her notes square against the lectern. But she had already known that. One didn’t spend four years in political science, studying some of the greatest speechmakers of English history, working within a system codified over hundreds of years, then cross the ocean to look at how the brash and inventive Americans did things, without having a moderate grasp of how to compose a cogent and motivating case in favour of whatever one happened to feel like supporting. Nor did one spend several years in Toastmasters without knowing how to project confidence, which was the single most important tool in any speaker’s arsenal.

She knew she was good. She thought, now and then, as she bent over her books, of the velvet-dust and wood-polish smell of the House of Commons, and the onionskin paper of law books, and how she might someday stand in front of a much larger and more important audience than a roomful of bored Americans, might speak about something she truly believed in and use these skills to make the lives of thousands better.

She wanted no more and no less than to change the world. Which was the one thing she found she had in common with her classmates, even if her vision of it was perhaps somewhat… different.

Eileen Hux hadn’t made a lot of friends. Ever, really, but especially here, where people wanted their lives warm and cozy and comforting - they found her elbows too sharp and her gaze too unsettling. This was the price of not tolerating fuzzy thinking. Empires neither rose nor fell on the strength of warm cozy comforting ideas - it was the sharp and dangerous ones, the ones full of claws and vicious teeth, that had to be watched for. She had an idea that she might be able to make a career out of just those sorts of ideas.

She was mulling one over now, today’s debate behind her and the next one already occupying the space at the back of her brain where she let ideas run around and settle. They were working through the implications of McCarthyism this semester, and it had already brought out some very interesting opinions that she rather hoped had been articulated just for the sake of the debate. One never knew, with Americans. Their revolutionary past was not as distant as it seemed, and she found her classmates too prepared to take up arms on the strength of incompletely examined ideologies. But she thought she could exploit it, at least for the purposes of getting a grade.

“It is important,” she murmured to herself as she walked, “to be aware of - hm - destabilising influences on the fabric of society -” That sounded too pat, and she thought she had lifted it from a textbook. But rhetoric didn’t need to be original to be effective, after all. “However, the expectation of privacy and the burden of proof -” Too much ground to cover. Narrow the argument.

“Miss,” she heard from behind her. “Miss!”

She hated being called _Miss_ : it was infantilising and carried none of the authority of _Sir_ or even _Mister_. So she didn’t turn right away, not until the running steps drew closer and the speaker was just at her shoulder.

“Miss. It’s Eileen, isn’t it?” He was short, skinny - blonde. He sat in the back row of her rhetoric class and didn’t pay attention. She had not bothered to learn his name.

“Yes,” she said. “Eileen Hux. May I help you in some way?”

He grinned. “Well, I don’t know. It all depends.”

She sighed, kept from rolling her eyes by an effort of will: “On what? I’m sorry, I have a class to get to.” She didn’t, she was finished for the day, but it was a decent excuse to speed up this conversation she already found she didn’t want to have.

“What are you doing on Thursday afternoon?” said the boy - David, maybe? Daniel? Darwin? She didn’t care.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why?”

“Gosh,” he chuckled. “You’re an easy sell. Relax, I’m not asking you out or anything. I just - you’re really good at public speaking, right?”

“I suppose,” she said grudgingly.

“Look, I’m in the amateur drama society, and we have auditions on Thursday afternoon. It’s As You Like It this semester - Shakespeare, nothing lowbrow.” He grinned at her again, as though he thought he had her figured out. “I just heard your accent, and thought, hey, you’d make a terrific Rosalind - you’ve got the confidence, you know how to work a crowd, you’ve got the -” He made a hand gesture encompassing her body. “The _oomph_. You know?”

“I don’t.” 

She hoped this cold rejoinder would shut him down, but he was unsinkable, bobbed back to the surface again: “I really think you should consider it. The auditions are in the theatre starting at 4, you’d be a shoo-in.”

“Thank you for the offer -” she _still_ couldn’t remember his name - “but I’ll have to think about it.”

“I hope I see you there,” he said, and grinned again - what _was_ it with Americans and their obsession with toothpaste-advertisement smiles? - before jogging back the way they’d come.

“You won’t,” she said to herself, and hiked her books closer to her chest as she kept going.

She did know the play, though. She knew it better than most of them, owing to an English teacher who had insisted upon reading everything aloud, and had dragged her through most of it playing Rosalind to his Orlando, as the only two who had been able to make it sound something like a conversation. He’d had an unfortunate habit of being unable to fully leave behind the pentameter, though. Still, it had been less objectionable than poor Lady Macbeth, or the rather drivellingly stupid Juliet. Eileen Hux, even at 14, would never have lain down and died for any man. At least Rosalind got up, put on trousers and got what she wanted, which were three of Eileen’s favourite things to do. And should she by some miracle get cast, she’d spend half the play in doublet and hose, with a sock down the front of them, which was certainly better than whatever the drama company might dream up for Celia. Eileen didn’t, as a general rule, believe in dresses.

The idea was slow to grow on her, but she had to admit it: despite her instant and fully correct dismissal of Davis or Dennis or Derwent or whatever his name actually was, she was… a little bit flattered. She had worked hard on the confidence that had never come naturally to a tall, pale, ginger girl, and it was nice to think her skills had been noticed.

But she was still fairly surprised at herself, sitting in the large rehearsal hall off the theatre, with a copy of As You Like It in her hands.

They’d put out folding chairs, vaguely in lines, and a couple of dozen people were spread around, some chatting and others with their books out, mouthing lines. Most people seemed to know each other, which wasn’t much of a surprise; a few of them had glanced up when Eileen had walked in, but none of them had kept looking.

There were six empty chairs, like an exclusion zone, around a tall boy slumped on the chair in the corner, with his feet tucked in against each other. He had dark hair in a mod cut, and he was muttering audibly to himself and scowling at the legal pad and book he held, one in each of his big hands.

He twitched when she put her bag down, leaving a chair open between them, but didn’t look up at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said tartly. “Is this seat taken?”

That got his - rather large - nose out of his book. He blinked big dark eyes at her.

“Hello?” she tried. “Do you speak?”

He sucked on the right corner of his full bottom lip for a second, the expression wry and considering.

“Your accent,” he said slowly, “is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. But then - of course. Her thumb found the bookmark in her copy at Act 3 Scene 2, and she opened it without looking. “I have been told so of many,” she said, without breaking eye contact, and she saw the corner of his mouth quirk upwards. “But indeed an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth an inland man; one that knew courtship too well, for there he fell in love.” She rolled her eyes. “I have heard him read many lectures against it, and I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal.”

And they were off, her mysterious Orlando watching her carefully with increasingly badly hidden glee as she ran through Rosalind’s lines.

“I am he that is so love-shaked,” he proclaimed, eyes sparkling. “I pray you, tell me your remedy.”

Unlikely. She put her full allowance of scorn behind the words: “There is none of my uncle's marks upon you: he taught me how to know a man in love; in which cage of rushes I am sure _you_ are not prisoner.”

He tipped his head to the side a little, like a confused puppy. “What were his marks?”

She ticked them off on her fingers, and stared him down. “A lean cheek, which you have not.” Definitely not. “A blue eye and sunken, which you have not.” Not those dark eyes, still full of laughter. “An unquestionable spirit, which you have not, a beard neglected, which you have not;” - he didn’t even look as though he could grow one - “but I pardon you for that, for simply your having in beard is a younger brother's revenue.” She raked her eyes over his clothing - natty enough to impress the audition panel, she suspected. “Then your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation; but you are no such man.” She leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest. “You are rather point-device in your accoutrements as loving yourself than seeming the lover of any other.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, to look up at her: earnest, puppyish, pleading. “Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.”

She snorted. Nobody looked at Eileen Hux that way. “Me believe it! you may as soon make her that you love believe it; which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess she does: that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences.” Then she drew back from him, letting the sudden realisation widen both her eyes and her smirk: “But, in good sooth, are you he that hangs the verses on the trees, wherein Rosalind is so admired?”

He groaned. “I swear to thee, youth.” And then he reached out, and scooped up her hand. She didn’t know why she let him. “By the white hand of Rosalind,” he said, “I am that he, that unfortunate he.”

His hand was really very large.

And very warm.

And he was still looking into her eyes.

She cleared her throat, suddenly off-balance. The words were there on the page, but for a second she couldn’t read them. “But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?”

The hall door banged open and there was Dibley or Derek, at last, holding a clipboard.

“Can we have our Rosalinds first, please,” he called. “Eileen Hux? You’re up.”

She shut her book, and gave her Orlando a tiny apologetic smile.

“Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much,” he said softly, and smiled back - a smile that suddenly changed the entire character of his face.

He squeezed her hand, and then let it go. And she stumbled as she stepped backwards, and followed after Dudley or Dante with a flutter in her chest that she didn’t at all know what to do with.

It tripped her up on her words, in front of the audition panel; it made her uncharacteristically clumsy, and when they asked her to move she felt stiff and ungainly as a teenager. She could see on their faces that there was no hope. 

She hadn’t even wanted it, not really, but losing it was still painful. Dean or Doyle was waiting in the hallway, and smiled at her hopefully, but she shook her head as she stuffed her book into her bag. “I’m not meant for the stage,” she said, and out of mechanical politeness, “but thank you for the invitation.”

“Wait,” he said, jogging two steps after her.

“I think not,” she said, firmly, and set her face as she pushed open the door.

It had been a silly idea in the first place. She’d known that all along. And it was even sillier to be upset about it, because who could have ever imagined her making any sort of reasonable Rosalind? She was too tall by half, too skinny, ridiculous in a dress - not the sort of woman any noble son might be moved to excesses of poetry over.

Nobody ever looked at Eileen Hux the way Orlando looked at Rosalind, even done up as Ganymede. And that was what it was. It certainly wasn’t likely to change. 

She didn’t need to be an actress to be Prime Minister. In fact the very idea of the sort of stateswoman she fancied herself being, peacocking around at the footlights, was completely unsuitable. But there - Elizabeth I had been no legendary beauty, and that was a woman who had managed to _accomplish_ things.

Still feeling slightly sour about the whole experience, she decided she would treat herself to dinner out, if that was really what it could be called; she had reading to do, and her grad student budget precluded anything fancier than the university’s cafeteria, but they did a decent cottage pie and truly spectacular cinnamon rolls, and no-one would get upset at her for reading at the table.

She tucked herself and her tray away at one of the small four-seat tables near the window, and dove into the Lincoln biography with more enthusiasm than the food. It was a good book, actually - some of her reading was very dry, but this was engrossing enough that her food was quite cold halfway through Chapter 2.

And then a tray clacked down opposite hers, laden with a double portion of meat and potatoes, and she looked up, startled.

It was her Orlando, smiling rather more nervously than he had in the rehearsal hall. He was taller than she’d thought - maybe even taller than she was.

“Eileen?” he said. “It is Eileen, right?”

“You have the advantage of me,” she said. “But yes.”

“I’m Ben,” he said, and offered a hand. 

She left it for almost too long, but finally shook. His fingers still managed to enfold most of her palm.

“You can sit, if you like,” she said, since he’d shown no sign of doing it uninvited.

“Oh,” he said, as though he’d forgotten that that was an option, let alone what normal people did.

Ben sat as awkwardly as he’d done everything else. “Uh, how was your audition?” he asked, as he wiggled his chair in.

She grimaced. “Do let’s talk about _anything_ else,” she said. “I was awful, and that’s the end of it.”

He scowled. “They told you that?”

“They hardly had to,” she said shortly.

“But you were _great_ ,” he said, disbelieving, almost offended on her behalf.

“Not on stage, I wasn’t.” She glared down at her plate. “I suppose you got the part.”

He laughed sharply. “Me? No. They hated me. Told me I was overdoing it.”

“Were you?”

His cheeks went red. “I was _acting_.”

“You were overdoing it.” She poked distastefully at her plate. “This is awful. You should eat yours before it gets cold, it doesn’t improve with age.”

“S’not so bad.” He waved at the book as he took a bite. “Got distracted?”

“I’m researching,” she said. “I’m doing my Masters in Poli Sci.”

“It’s a good book,” he said, in between bites. He ate fast, like there was some kind of time limit or someone would take it away and he’d starve. “I liked it a lot.”

“You’re not in Poli Sci, are you?” She felt certain she would have noticed him. How could one miss someone the size of a garden shed, with that face and those eyes?

“Nah. I started History this year, I’m a freshman. But I’m really into military history. Old stuff, the Civil War, the Boers - not, like, the Romans or the Normans, old, but everybody studies World War II.”

“Are you only 18?” Out of all the improbable things about him, that seemed the very most improbable. But she could see it, in the awkwardness, the lack of social graces - the tearing hunger.

“19.” He’d finished almost half his food already. “Took a year off. Drove around the country with my uncle. Supposed to be educational.”

She smiled. “I take it it was not.”

“Oh, I learned plenty.” Ben grinned wryly. “Mostly I learned that Uncle Luke and I don’t have a whole lot in common.”

“This is why road trips are difficult. You set out with the best of intentions, and then you’re in Land’s End and you realise you could cheerfully murder everyone in the caravan and you’ve still got to go five hundred miles back home with them.”

“Exactly, but substitute West Virginia.” Ben leaned his cheek on his hand. “What about you? You’re a long way from home. Did a road trip go wrong, and you had to kill everyone and run away to start a new life?” He leaned forward, palms on the table, eyes cartoonishly wide: “ _Is your name even Eileen?_ ”

She couldn’t help it - she laughed. “Don’t tell a soul,” she said, behind her hand. And something warm happened in her chest, right where the flutter had been in the afternoon.

And when he’d cleared his plate down to the last few smears of gravy, she pushed the plate with the cinnamon roll across to his side of the table.

He looked at her and smiled, wiped his knife off on a napkin and wiggled it deftly into the soft inner rings of the pastry. With a couple of careful stabs he had freed the squishy, cinnamon syrup-soaked centre, and presented it back to her on the flat of the knifeblade.

“I give you its heart,” he said solemnly, “a sacrifice as befits your might and mercy.”

She plucked it from the blade, delicately, and ate it in three bites. He watched her do it.

“Your sacrifice pleases me,” she said, smiling around the fingertip she was licking clean.

“I ask a boon, o mighty one.” He set down the knife. “A very simple one.”

She eyed him. “And what would you have of me, o knight?”

“Just your phone number,” he said, dropping the high fantasy.

She shook her head. “I live in the dorms. There’s a shared line, but I don’t have my own.”

“Well, I’m in a share house, but the guys I live with are pretty cool - if I gave you my number… would you call me?”

She thought about it, perhaps for too long - long enough that his face fell, and he looked down at the plate again.

“I’m 24,” she said. “You don’t think that’s too much of an age gap?”

“It’s only five years.” He didn’t look up, though. “But I get it. You don’t have to. I just thought… never mind.”

He pushed back his chair, and the small warm place in her went cold - “Ben,” she said, “no. Stay.” She made herself smile. “You asked a boon, in return for the heart of your quarry. Although _I_ bought that cinnamon roll, but that’s beside the point. You asked, and I’ll grant it.”

His smile was so astonished that it almost hurt to look at it. “You will?”

She pulled the index card she was using as a bookmark out of the Lincoln book and handed it to him with her pencil. “Go on.”

He scribbled the number quickly, added his name underneath, and shoved it back across to her, as though he were afraid that if he dawdled, she’d revoke the offer. 

“All right.” She wedged the index card into the book. “Now I won’t lose it.”

He nodded, and she saw him watch the book as she tucked it into her bag, until the card was out of sight. His shoulders relaxed slightly. But only slightly.

She tapped the rim of the plate with the cinnamon roll on it, pushing it towards him. “Eat,” she said gently.

He did, peeling apart the layers of the cinnamon roll with those improbably long fingers. All of him was improbable, from the hands to the skin to the way he kept looking at her as if someone might snatch her away from him. He continued to be a person looking at Eileen Hux in a way people did not, never had, never _should_.

And she knew she shouldn’t want him to keep doing it: he was only 19, and it was only going to end in tears, and inconveniences, and awkward crossed paths for another couple of years. She wasn’t good at this. Every relationship she’d had was like that, over before it had a chance to get too serious, except sometimes it already had gotten too serious before she noticed. Ben seemed like the type who might already be very, very serious.

And yet.

He was sweet. She thought she could like him, thought she might already. He wasn’t intimidated by an older girl with brains, a rare enough thing. And he did know his Shakespeare.

Perhaps it might be worth a try.

\--- --- ---

(1967 - she’s not there)

“Leena.” There were curls tickling her shoulder, a heavy weight next to her on the bed. “I got the stuff.”

She thought about rolling over, but didn’t. Everything had felt like far too much work lately. She’d graduated, done the walk with the robes and the hat, collected the little tube of paper that meant nothing in real terms; Ben had kissed her, and kissed her and kissed her, and called her Master, which was funny for about twenty minutes. And then she had gone to bed, because she’d wanted to do that for about six months and hadn’t been able to spare the time.

She wasn't entirely sure when it had happened - in the run-up to her thesis defense she hadn't had a spare braincell to call her own, and after so long being ratcheted up to higher and higher levels of tension she just… hadn't noticed how _tired_ she was. Tired of politics, and poli sci, and school; tired of getting up and going out and doing things; tired of trying to speak with people, or at them. Everything had been exhausting for weeks, and now that the storm had passed, so should the exhaustion have, but it hadn't. She was just, quite simply, tired of being Eileen Hux, with all that Eileen Hux's life traditionally entailed or was likely to. And none of it seemed worth the effort, not when the effort was so huge. So bed it was, and she slept, and woke just as tired, just as empty, and stared at the wall waiting for things to make sense on their own, because she couldn’t get them in any kind of order.

The problem was, in between the naps, there wasn’t much else to do but think about what she meant to do with any of what she had built - and what part of her life she would choose, if she had to. When she had to. 

There had been too many questions about that lately, and there would be more with the degree finished, and every single one made it worse, another grain of sand on the pile that would eventually spill and bury her. She knew it was foolhardy to think that spending two years of her life with any one person meant they had to be together forever - she’d never made it this far, before, with anyone, and it was a miracle neither she nor Ben had run screaming by now. But she knew, too, that soon he would ask her to choose, even if he didn’t mean to. 

People didn’t stay in long-term relationships that stayed the same forever. He’d want something new soon, and she couldn’t give him anything but what they already had. Not without throwing away her chance at a career - not if he wanted to settle down. And she couldn’t see herself as a housewife without wanting to be sick. The idea of giving it all up and raising a family felt like death by degrees, everything she didn’t want and nothing at all she did - nothing at all but the sweet boy with the big eyes and the big hands and the heart he insisted on laying at her feet, just where she’d kick it.

And yet she loved him. As much as she’d ever loved anyone. And if there was anyone at all she could have been a little woman for, gone through the horror of pregnancy and the terror of parenthood and tried not to go mad for, perhaps it was the only person who’d ever looked at her as though they’d give it a good honest go.

She wanted to want it. Wanted to want that, with him. Wanted not to want to run.

All of it was simply far too difficult. She could only push it all to the side, leave herself blank and hope he didn’t ask until things had cleared themselves up in her head and she could contemplate it all without spiraling dizzily out of control.

She really had stayed in bed for several days, Ben drifting around in a loose orbit that sometimes saw him curled up behind her, with the broad windbreak of his shoulders sheltering her narrow ones, and sometimes saw him drag the record player up from the living room so they could listen to Brubeck and Evans while he braided and unbraided her hair. The jazz made her feel less… whatever this was.

It wasn’t sad, not exactly, not actively. It was just… a lack. A lack of anything, a lack of _everything_. There was a space in her that wasn’t filled, didn’t seem to be able to _be_ filled. And Ben had tried - _how_ he tried, like a puppy who couldn’t grasp that there were things puppies couldn’t fix. 

He had puppied at her for about a week, and then had lost his temper rather spectacularly and broken a potted plant and two plates. Even that had produced no response from her. He had seemed to feel better about things after that, at least, which was fairly standard for his temper, and it had cleared his head enough that he’d actually come up with a useful idea.

It was time for a change. Any kind of a change, and a change of scenery was the easiest. Ben had suggested San Francisco, which seemed to be where things were happening, and that had been enough of an incentive for her to get up and get dressed for a couple of weeks. They’d driven up, gotten a room, and then the wind had gone from her sails and she had pitched face-first onto the bed and crawled under the covers still in her clothes, unable to face the prospect of anything else.

Even this, the business of a holiday, suddenly seemed like work. So she’d told Ben to go have fun without her, given that it would be much easier than trying to have it with her now that she was incapable of anything so energetic as fun.

He had tried to convince her, but in the end she’d won, in the same way inertia tended to win most battles, and he’d gone out and come back full of stories - new people, new places, and someone who knew where he could get some LSD.

They’d talked about that when San Francisco had been tabled. There were already people at the college who had dropped acid, but there was no real supply chain and Ben wanted to try it. Eileen wasn’t thrilled, but then, given that she was no longer certain she could be thrilled, perhaps it was time to try something that might snap her out of it.

Now she eyed the two little slips of paper in the envelope Ben held out to her warily. “Is that it?” she said. “Unimpressive.”

“It’s the real thing,” Ben said eagerly. “Or if it isn’t, well, Poe’s lying to me, but this is from the guy he told me about, and it’s supposed to be really clean. Really good.”

“What does one do with it?” Eileen put her head back down on the pillows.

“You put it under your tongue.” Ben let the envelope fall onto the sheets between them. “And then you lie back and let the magic happen.”

He sat up, rolled off the bed - went to the radio on the table by the window and flicked it on, filling the room with something with a lot of acoustic guitars and gentle vocals.

“There,” he said, satisfied, and flopped back down on the bed next to her. “So?” He wiggled the envelope in his long fingers. “What do you say, will you come with me to Wonderland?”

She sighed, but opened her mouth and let him tuck one of the little squares of paper behind her teeth, under her tongue. He did the same for himself, and fluffed the pillow under his head, and they waited.

An hour later, and the radio was playing jazz, and she was almost asleep, cradled in his arms; he’d pulled her to him early on. Better and better it seemed, as her body detached from her consciousness, to have the weight of him to hold her together, to tether her to the world.

She reached without looking and pressed her hand against the side of his throat, to feel the pulse there and let it beat, beat, until her own heart slowed. She had opened her eyes, before, and could see every particle of dust in the air, looping and dancing; they left trails, and the whole room had become full of spirals, and she had hidden her face dizzily against Ben’s chest.

He was whispering to her, had been for a while. She didn’t hear words. They were sounds, with the edges of the notes of his voice, the high and the low - so high, and so low, and she heard the child he had been and the man he was becoming at the same time and knew that he would keep her here with him forever.

But who was she, where was who she was in all of this? And she, and she. She was beyond such things as a name, as a body with expectations on it just because of its outside - she was full of sunlight and power, as though she could open her eyes and beam it forth, and who could stop her, who would stop her? The universe would be hers to command. She had no limitations, no boundaries. Only Ben and the heart of him under her hand, beat, beat.

His fingers trailed over her ribs like the particles, all spirals and light tracking over her skin; she was covered, she was naked, they were alive and she could feel every cell in its constant state of burning, the way every human body was a cosmic furnace like the heart of a star, the heart, the beating heart, and her heart was against his palm, leaping as though it could be free.

She willed it to be so, willed the prison of her body to open and let her walk free. Why was she tied this way, to irrelevant flesh, to the tension at the back of her neck and in her jaw? Why the so-heavy bones, and the flesh over them, and the heart under them trapped? Couldn’t she be remade until she was right?

But the magic wasn’t strong enough, and the hands on her smoothed her skin shut, pushed her back into herself, into the places that chafed and couldn’t fit her. Into the way she wasn’t, the many ways she wasn’t, she wasn’t, but what did he know about that, so warm and good in himself, so much the sun that she drank the light off of to survive? He couldn’t know. She pushed the hand away.

He held her and it was a trap and a blessing and she was breathing too fast and he put his whole body between her and the world, all of him, everything he was to protect her - for what, what was there worth protecting? He seemed to know but he couldn’t tell her. She didn’t know the words to understand it.

And there were both of them, her halfway inside his skin to see if it might feel better than her own, him halfway out of himself, humming with energy both kinetic and potential, like a falling star, a falling bomb, an unknown quantity, not yet what he would be, both of them listening to his heart beat, beat, the march of time, and years passed and they were there still.

“Leena,” he breathed, against her skin, breathed her name in and out, and rested his fingers against her belly.

“Tell me,” she said, asking for him to understand what she could not - he did, he could see into another spectrum and under those colours of light he could know the truth of her, he would speak it and she would be released.

He giggled like the Buddha. “You.”

“Me.” She stroked his lips, his cheeks, reading him like a Braille grimoire, all magic under her fingertips.

“You wanna get married?” He put his fingers over her mouth. “Shh, don’t, not yet. Don’t say no yet. Just. Think about it.” And his hands dripped ice down her spine. “Think about you and me, and every day me coming home to you - and, like _twelve little babies_ -”

The earth heaved under her and threw her away from him, away from the bed, pushed her across the room and into the tiny bathroom in a tornado that seemed to have its eye too far away from her to ever bring calm, ever again.

She locked the door and climbed into the tub. She couldn’t breathe. She was going to be sick, she was going to scream, she couldn’t breathe - everything had teeth, claws, sharp edges, and she had to scream into the folded towels that hung on the edge of the tub, scream until she broke and sobbed, sob until she fell back against the wall. Until the ghastly hand of death loosened its grip on the back of her neck.

And then she ran the tub full of water, and floated, fully dressed, a drowning Ophelia with her hair like seaweed around her.

Hours - many - later, with the water cold for the third time and her skin still somehow attached to her body, she drained the tub and got out, stripped off her wet clothes into a heap, wrapped herself in the towel that bore flecks of blood from bitten lips, from opened palms; pulled over that the dressing gown from the back of the door. She couldn’t look at her body. It was wrong, so death-white and skinny except where it shouldn’t have been; it had to be hidden. This wasn’t her, this waterlogged stranger; how could it be? How could her spirit be - this?

Ben was curled up, asleep, on the floor outside the door.

She stepped over him, and shuddered, and climbed back into bed.

\---

In the morning everything was strange. He sat at the table by the window, staring at a cup of weak tea, all the red leached out of his cheeks and lips and redistributed in sick blotching around his eyes. She had ruined this, ruined him and herself, and she couldn’t look at anything for more than a few moments without a stab behind her eyes.

She couldn’t touch him. She wanted to, but she didn’t deserve it. He’d done nothing wrong, not really, not that she could explain to him. Not that she could even explain to herself. 

As she brushed past him to find something to wear, he caught her wrist, encircled it in his hand.

“Leena?” His voice was as cracked as hers would no doubt be, if she could talk at all. “I’m sorry. Just… do you still love me?”

She made a pained sound, wavered on her feet - and then pulled him close, his head resting on her ribcage, her arms around his neck. “So much,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to help me.”

“Forget I said anything,” he said, desperate, tumbling over the words. “Just, forget yesterday happened at all. This city’s so beautiful, and it’s full of beautiful people, and you’ve gotta _see_ it, Leena, come with me today and _see_. I know you’ll love it.”

“All right,” she said weakly.

She got dressed, and he drank his tea, and they pretended as hard as they could that everything was fine; he made little jokes, and laughed at them, and she held his hand and let him show her things.

The streets teemed with people, like a tide that caught up and collected against every outcrop - she stepped over their legs as they sat against walls, brushed up against their shoulders as they chatted and waited for the lights to change.

It wasn’t quite what she’d been led to expect, from the rather hysterical reports in some of the newspapers. The hippies, most of them, looked more or less like her, like Ben - perhaps slightly less recently washed, or more obviously handknit, but not wild or frightening or even like they would be very much out of place on any college campus.

Things were slightly freakier in the park. She drifted at Ben’s side, through clouds of fragrant smoke and waves of music, drums and guitars and singing all melding into a high-level background hum. People smiled at her. She couldn’t smile back. A girl with a crown of daisies on her head pressed a flower into Ben’s hand and he tucked it behind his ear.

Here was where the people who had abandoned convention gathered, like a shipful of aliens come to Earth and dressed in the entire contents of a drama department’s wardrobe. There was so much lamé and paisley on display that her still acid-dazzled senses couldn’t parse it as more than a blur. She might have thought they had dressed themselves at random, but every one of them looked so happy and at peace with themselves; men in skirts with their faces painted and women naked to the waist, all at home in their skins. They embraced, greeting strangers as though they had grown up together; no distance between open souls.

Everything was wrong, suddenly; a horrible wounded anger welling up in her from a source she didn’t know. She was so dizzy with it, with the emotion on top of the colour and the movement and the noise and the secondhand high, that she had to grip Ben’s arm with both hands so she wouldn’t fall.

“Leena?” He caught her shoulders, tipped her chin up a little and stared into her eyes. “Are you okay?”

 _Nobody will ever know all of me like that,_ she wanted to say, but that made no sense. _They know who they are and it’s different and it’s fine and I’m going to start screaming again if anyone touches me -_

“I’m not,” she forced out between her teeth, the only safe statement. The more she qualified it the less sense it made.

“What do you need?” He pulled her into a hug, and she almost couldn’t breathe again, but forced herself to do it anyway.

“Get me out of here.” She pressed her forehead against his shoulder, looked at the ground for a minute - just grass, just grass, nothing special - and perhaps she could look at the grass for long enough to get free of this place.

There were forty-seven tiny daisies before they hit pavement, and someone was asking Ben if she was okay, and Ben was saying she was, she’d just had too much, and she had: so much too much of everything.

She barely registered the walk back, or anything really before he was tucking her back into bed.

“Do you want me to stay?” he said, and the fact that he asked that question was amazing enough, showed more perception than he usually had - but her own mind was noisy enough, the pressure of anyone else’s was simply more than she could handle.

“Go,” she said. “Just.” She tried to soften it. “I need to be alone for a while. Go out. Have fun. It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”

He bit his lip, and squeezed her shoulder - and then kissed her cheek, tentatively, as though he thought she might push him away.

She waited until the door had shut behind him to start crying.

She didn’t know what time it was when she got up again, only that it was still afternoon and with any luck she would be alone for a while yet.

An idea had swum into her head - an idea that had been there before, that was often there, amongst the background noise - and she worked quickly, before anyone could discover her and she had to explain.

Her eyebrow pencil, on the line of her jaw, feathered out and up; more on her upper lip and the contours of her chin, and filling out the arch of her brows until they were straighter. A pair of stockings wrapped round her chest and tied behind her, pushing her small breasts flat to her ribs. Her hair swept straight back, parted at the side and tied low on her neck, ponytail out of sight down the collar of the smallest of Ben’s shirts, done up to the throat. 

She looked at herself in the little mirror over the sink.

It was…

Stupid.

Ridiculous.

Awful.

And she was _fucking this up_ , this felt critically important and she was _fucking it up_ , whatever this was, and the awkward and badly made-up face in the mirror crumpled and she hid it in a washcloth, scrubbed angrily as she cried again, because even _this_ she couldn’t do properly. Not even like this would she ever belong amongst the beautiful self-possessed people in the park. Nobody could love her like this. And having been this, she could never be the person they could love - the person Ben could love.

But just for a second there, before her eyes had focused and the too-harsh, too-obvious pantomime makeup had jarred her back to reality…

Just for a second, in a way it never had before, the world had felt _right_.

She had gone back to bed by the time Ben came back, smelling of nag champa and strong weed, and she declined all offers of anything until he eventually let her be. 

He slept beside her, both of them on the outside edges of the bed, and she knew finally and completely that it was over.

In the morning she couldn’t see her way clear to getting out of bed at all, and told him to go without her. He left, disappointed but philosophical enough about it, but he made her promise, probably unwisely, that she would meet him for lunch. 

She spent two hours, motionless on her back, staring at the ceiling, and thinking through her options; they were few, and unpleasant, but she had done far too many classes in logic not to know what the answer would have to be. 

It was as though someone else was moving her hands, when she got up and packed her clothes into her suitcase; someone else dressed her in the light cotton shift and stockings; someone else braided her hair. 

She watched from a great distance as her body descended the stairs, and walked itself to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, where she could see Ben from half a block away, leaning against the lamppost.

He’d been back to the park. He had a crown of daisies on his head, twined through the dark hair that was getting long enough to piece out in curls, almost to his shoulders now. Someone had painted a heart on his cheek. He was very high, very obviously, and so happy to see her; the joyful aliens in the park had accepted him as one of their number, and he was riding whatever he’d taken on a wave of pure bliss that beamed out of him. 

It fell short of reaching her. It would always fall short of reaching her.

Nothing, in fact, seemed to be capable of reaching her.

Perhaps she wasn’t there at all, while her voice explained to Ben that she was leaving, that she was going, back to England; that she couldn’t be with him anymore. That she loved him, yes, but she didn’t even know who she was. That she had to do this and she hoped he could understand.

She focused on the heart on his cheek, bright red; the only spot of colour left as the world shifted to black and white around her. 

He tried to speak to her but she couldn’t hear, over the ringing in her ears and the terrible distance between them. She told him again that she loved him. And she did. She thought, most likely, that she always would. 

It didn’t seem to help her.

He grabbed her shoulders.

She slid free, stepped back.

Watched as a tear dripped through the paint and spoiled it.

And whatever force was moving her made her turn, and walk away from him as fast as she could, until she was swallowed up by the crowd.


End file.
